Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

In my short, short life I’ve spent a lot of time in interrogation rooms, enough to tell if the people doing the interrogating knew what they were doing or if they were just rank amateurs looking to rattle my cage.

The people who’d caught me this time belonged to the former category.

The room was a few degrees too hot, enough to cause a slight sweat but not enough to make you notice it terribly unless you were really feeling for it. The walls were featureless save for the door and a mirror that most certainly had a few men in official-looking suits standing on the other side of it, enjoying the sight of a young man sweating (perverts, probably). The lights were bright enough to be an irritation, but not so bright I couldn’t open my eyes, and the missing foot on my chair made it rock slightly. My chair was lower than those of the interrogators who’d be sitting across the table from me any moment now.

I wasn’t handcuffed, which meant they were confident they didn’t need me handcuffed.

All subtle cues, all telling me how much I needed to be on guard around these people.

The door opened. A man and a woman walked in; the woman cold and professional in an immaculate business suit and carrying a briefcase, the man thin and tall with a moustache nearly as skinny as himself and a flesh-colored eyepatch over his right eye.

This is what my eyes could tell me.

When it came to people, though, eyes weren’t all I had. Like I could tell you that she was suffering from indigestion, and he had a strained left knee from what felt like a sports injury. He hadn’t slept very much, and she was on an upper of some sorts. Both of them had superpowers, both of them were completely calm, and both of them had the heartbeats of people who would kill me if they had to and wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.

This I knew because I was a super with an excellent line on how people’s bodies worked and how to make them do what I wanted. This was also likely why I was here.

“Thank you for your patience, Mr. Long. I am Lieutenant Bowman, this is Mr. Hastings, and we’re with the Ministry of Metahuman Concerns. Would you like a drink, perhaps, before we get started? Coffee? Tea? Iced water?” the woman asked as she sat down opposite me. Hastings didn’t leave his place by the door.

The heat of the room made water tempting, but I wouldn’t let them see any weakness, “I would like to speak with an attorney.”

“And if you were under arrest, you would have that option. But this here isn’t an arrest, it’s just an informal inquiry,” Bowman said, her smile pure ice. Hastings didn’t move from his spot by the door.

“Then I’m free to go,” I said, standing and approaching the door. Hastings stood in front of it, his face impassive.

“We didn’t say that. Things work differently in the Ministry, and with your status as a non-registered superhuman, you belong to us until we are satisfied we’re finished with you. Do you understand?” Bowman asked, never leaving her seat.

“Piss off,” I said, raising a hand to Hastings. Something was wrong. He should have had a massive wave of drowsiness and walked out of my way, but he didn’t move. He barely budged. Traces of a smile grew at his lips. There was a feeling in my skull, a twitch, like someone reaching inside, peering around.

“You’ll find Mr. Hastings’ gift is to neutralize the gifts of others, so while you are in this room, you are at our mercy,” she said.

Not bloody likely. You think I don’t know you won’t let me leave this room? Just play their game and find an opening.

I sat back down.

“Much better,” Bowman said, opening her briefcase. She pulled out a laptop, opened it up and started typing.

“Now before we begin, we have a few questions just to confirm some information. Need to make sure we dot all the I’s and cross every T, don’t we?” she asked, smiling.

“Ask away,” I said.

“Your full name?”

“Liam Long.”

“No middle name?”

“No.”

“Date of birth?”

“I’m twenty-one, if that’s what you’re asking, but I was never given a proper actual birthdate.”

“I see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were a ward of the state?”

“Until I escaped, yes.”

“At age fifteen?”

“Yes. Is that a crime?”

“Technically speaking, yes, but since that’s not what my department covers, I’ll be more than happy to let you slide on this.”

“Thank you. Now if you don’t mind my asking, if you have all the answers, why do you need me here?” I said.

“We’re getting to that. Now, you are gainfully employed now, are you not?” Bowman asked.

I smiled, “Yes. At St. Martin’s Flowers.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

“Sweeping up. Heavy lifting. Running the register from time to time. I’m not that brilliant at making arrangements, but I can make decent funeral wreaths when I must.”

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” Bowman asked.

“What is?” I asked.

“Well, that with a superpower that grants you complete control over the human body, you just work as a shop boy? You could be a healer. You could be rich. And instead you content yourself to a life of mediocrity. Why is that?” she asked.

A question I’ve known most of my adult life.

“I find happiness in it,” I said.

“Do you find happiness in anything else?” she asked.

“Plenty of things.”

“Like what?”

“Football. Girls. A good pint. Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said.

“Really?” she said, tapping a few keys on her keyboard and turning the laptop around. “Not even this?”

There were a few pictures of smoking craters and burned out buildings, pillars of smoke, sad, scared-looking people in crowds. Red-caped superheroes were keeping order and putting out the flames, but the damage had been done. Not enough.

She tapped a button, and a series of circles surrounded a face in each picture. My face.

“You’ve been at an awful lot of IRA attacks, haven’t you, Mr. Long?”

“Me and everyone else in Northern Ireland,” I said.

“But it is an awful coincidence, isn’t it?” she said.

“Seeing as how I am completely innocent, I would say it is indeed awful,” I said. With how emphatically I said that, I nearly believed myself.

“Really, Spasm?” she said. My heart lurched. Someone had talked.

“That is your, what should I call it, terrorist codename? Supervillain name?” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, keeping my voice steady, though finding that twitch in my head harder to ignore.

“I’m afraid you do, actually,” Bowman said. “You see, my gift, since I assume you know already that like Hastings, I too am gifted, is to tell when people are lying. And, well, you’re lying pretty fiercely now, aren’t you?”

So it was her prying into my brain. Her wriggling around in there. Her I’d have to make exceptionally pay.

“What do you want?” I asked, all pleasantness gone.

“The usual, if you’d please. Names. Dates. Incriminating information. I’ll even dangle a nice deal in front of you to sweeten things, because I’m not a monster, and I know you’re not either. But before anything else, I’d like to know one simple thing. From all the information we have on you, we know you to be a political and religious moderate with no radical tendencies. Why would you join a terrorist organization?”

Her look was pure smugness. Hastings even let his guard off me for a moment, looking over to Bowman to confirm that she had every reason to be this smug. I knew I had to play this next moment very carefully, and take a lot of chances.

Chances like them being so overconfident in their powers that they didn’t come armed.

“This isn’t a test. More a matter of personal curiosity. Even if you’ve a shit answer, I’ll take it,” she said, leaning forward expectantly.

“I just don’t like seeing bullies step on the little guy,” I said, leaning my rickety chair back, just far enough to take its front two legs off the ground.

The next part I did very quickly.

Feet firmly on the ground, I rocked the chair out from underneath me, swinging it overhand onto Bowman’s head. Her blood splattered across the table, her laptop, even my shirt. Hastings looked at me, afraid, I think, so confident in his power that he didn’t think any action would be needed. He turned partway to the door, scrabbling for the handle and quick escape. I closed the gap between us, wrenching his arm behind his back, dislocating it with a satisfying pop before spinning him around and into the table. His head clanged off the corner satisfyingly, his blood mingling with Bowman’s.

I knew he’d lost consciousness the moment my powers came back. I could feel him, and Bowman, both bleeding, badly hurt. Officers were assembling outside, preparing to storm the room.

I wouldn’t give them that chance.

But first…

I approached Bowman. She wept softly, moaning in pain through a mouth of shattered teeth and what I took to be a bit of tongue she’d bitten off on the table.

Kneeling down beside her, I reached my hands to grab her temples and said, “Now if I were as wicked a man as you believe me to be, I’d take this opportunity and my newly rediscovered powers to do something truly unseemly to you, wouldn’t I?”

She howled out, a sound of raw, wet pain from her ruined mouth. Clearly she didn’t think very much of me. If I didn’t figure that already, I’m sure I’d have been offended.

Closing my eyes, I reached into her body and began the healing process. New teeth, new blood, new tongue, all wounds sealed. By the time I opened my eyes, she was as good as new, minus some disheveled hair and blood.

She looked at me, bewildered, “What did you-”

“Sleep,” I said. She complied.

The men outside the door opened it, standing with their automatic weapons trained on me. I waved a hand at them, and as one they all doubled over vomiting violently, letting me pass without any trouble.

I’m not a bad man, but I’m not a good man either. I have no problem admitting this. I don’t know if history will brand me a hero or a villain, a healer or a monster, a freedom fighter or a terrorist, and I don’t much care.

If a fight’s needed, Spasm will be there.

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

So, Jenniffer, what scares you, and how does it influence your writing?

Navigating Life Like A Writer

By Jenniffer Wardell

Nearly everything makes me anxious.

I mostly hide it in my day-to-day life, but nearly every second of my life there is something I'm either 1) panicking over, 2) pretending isn't happening (because the thought of it makes me panic) or 3) preparing for meticulously in the desperate hope that I can plan for every contingency, and thereby somehow create a magical (and so far theoretical) situation where I don't have to stress about something. This is, add you might imagine, extremely tiring.

Even fiction can make me anxious, so invested in the stresses the characters are going through that I feel like I'm going through them myself. I'm one of those reprehensible souls that check the endings of books before I start reading, because I can't deal with falling in love with a character just to see them die. I know the uncertainty is supposed to be exciting, but I mostly just find it stressful.

On the surface, writing seems like the perfect solution to someone who wishes they could control everything. But the reality is that there's only so much you can control, even in fiction, because if you've written them right a character will insist on doing certain things whether you want them to our not. You can arrange a situation so they only get certain choices, but if they're determined to make things harder for themselves there's not much you can do to stop them. If you try, the story falls flat.

But somehow, watching my characters trip their way into one disaster after another has brought me a deeper comfort than the fantasy of control ever could have provided. Their lives are harder than mine could ever be, often with their own lives or the lives of others on the line. At the very least, they're left to deal with Major Peril (TM) while the most I ever run into world probably fall somewhere in the vicinity of Mild Disaster (TM).

Even better, they're no more competent then I am. Fairy tales are traditionally full of noble, wise heroes, the line of person that we all aspire to be. I, however, write fairy tales for the person I am, which is someone who means well but is really kind of a wreck. Generally, we never get to be heroes.

But somehow, novel after novel, I watch my characters survive whatever I throw at them. No, more than that - they actually save the day, stepping up to the plate and facing their worst fears for things they consider to be more important. No matter how scared they are, they never let it overwhelm them.

They give me hope. If they can make it through evil sorcerers and horrible curses, then I'll probably survive housing troubles or downturns at work. I may not be able to stop myself from worrying, but with their help I can worry a little less.

About Jenniffer Wardell

Jenniffer Wardell is the arts, entertainment, and lifestyle reporter for the Davis Clipper. She's won several awards from the Utah Press Association and the Utah Headliners Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She currently lives in Layton, Utah.

About Dreamless

For most princesses, a sleeping curse means a few inconvenient weeks unconscious followed by a happily-ever-after with their true love. Seventeen-year-old Elena's curse, however, was designed without a cure, which means that she's getting a century-long nap for her 18th birthday whether she wants it or not. After years of study she's still no closer to finding a cure, even with the help of an undead godfather and an enchanted mirror-turned-therapist. With only a year until the deadline she's learned to accept her fate. Sadly, there's one prince who doesn't seem to have gotten the memo and who’s continually trying to activate the curse so he can be the one to wake her up again. Only slightly less annoying is Cam, her new bodyguard and former childhood acquaintance who disagrees with Elena at pretty much every turn. When the curse threatens to come early, however, they both realize that fate is a lot more complicated than they'd ever imagined.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

I always told them they weren’t trying hard enough. Anything can be a game if you apply enough pressure, force of will and creativity.

Reality-bending superpowers certainly help too.

I hadn’t had the powers for long, and so far they weren’t that great. I couldn’t kill El Capitán yet, and I probably couldn’t outsmart the Gamemaster, but I could completely warp reality within a couple inches of my body. A lot of people would call that a pretty crappy power, but they wouldn’t be trying hard enough.

Within an inch of my body includes my body, so instead of a pudgy little fifteen-year-old, I could be whatever I wanted, and what I wanted to be was Circus. Circus was a two-dimensional clown, stylized enough that he was more cool than creepy but creepy enough that the normal people would fear me.

As they should.

Circus was a living cartoon, better than everyone in every way possible. He was cool, he was powerful, and he could impress girls. Lots of girls. Because he was cool and powerful.

Yeah.

Circus would be popular when I was done with him, then I would tell everyone who I was, and then I would be popular. Respected. Feared. And they would all regret how they treated me, and made fun of me, and they would want to be my friend and take me to clubs and then I could have as many girlfriends as I wanted.

Because I’d be Circus.

The street was busy when I, no, Circus stepped out onto it. Some people looked at me funny for a second, but then ignored me. I was hardly the strangest thing on the street after all, with gene-jobs and supers and super-wannabes doing their thing, everybody dressed up for a night out on the town. Why would they have to recognize a 2-D clown walking in their midst?

Because this 2-D clown was going to fuck up their night. Big time.

Circus smiled, bouncing on top of a nearby sports car before touching it, warping the roof’s reality so there was nothing but a gooey, brightly-colored hole. The driver protested, even tried to yell, but Circus kicked her to the street.

Achievement Unlocked: Jack 1 car.

Circus put the pedal to the metal, zooming through the busy street, scraping off cars, scared people jumping out of the way, screaming. There was a crowd ahead, extra points, but they were all quick and scared enough to jump out of the way. The building behind them, though, didn’t.

Achievement Unlocked: Crash 1 car.

Laughing maniacally, Circus flew through the windshield, smacking into the wall, rolled up like a poster. He rolled to the ground, then straightened out, then got on his wobbly, flat feet in time to see the car burst into flames. Cool.

There was a vending machine nearby. Circus ripped it open, pulled out a half-dozen cans of energy drink in each hand, flipped them all open, and with mouth stretched open to the floor like a snake, drank them all down.

Achievement Unlocked: PROPERTY DESTRUCTION!

LEVEL UP!

Now this was really kicking into gear. The little people, the normal ones, the non-powered ones, they looked up at Circus and ran. Circus, and I, laughed down at them. Clown shoes expanding into large red slabs, Circus smashed the street beneath them. There should have been people beneath the shoes, people to squash like bugs and disappear like bad guys always did, but they were too fast, too scared.

They didn’t want to have fun.

Instead the clown shoes just smashed into, and through, the ground.

Achievement Unlocked: Pound the pavement.

Through the ground, into the subway. Circus could have climbed back outside. Circus could have done anything he wanted to. Instead, Circus heard the oncoming sound of a train and got himself an idea. As soon as the lights were on him, he jumped into the air, transformed into a giant, vertical buzzsaw blade with Circus’ smiling face on the side, and cut right through the front and center of the train. Car after car, Circus sliced through and shot to the back. There was the sound of squealing breaks. Crashing. Sparks. Everybody screaming.

Achievement Unlocked: Derail 1 train.

Circus was in one of the last cars of the train when everything stopped. Nearly everybody was on the floor, bleeding and broken and bruised, though there were a few girls in school uniforms sitting on a back bench, huddled and crying and scared, trying to call out on their cell phones. Back in his clown form, Circus smiled and slid in between the girls with outstretched arms around all of their shoulders.

They screamed and ran. Circus shrugged. He’d reload a saved game next time and try the approach differently. Every achievement was possible, it had to be in the game, you just had to figure out how to approach them.

The train halves had come to a stop partly in a station. Emergency personnel and police had already started to show. Circus smiled, jumping and bouncing off the floors and ceiling and finding the police officers easier to disable than he’d expected. They were harder to bounce off of, just crumpling to the ground, unconscious and broken after one hit.

15 HIT COMBO!!!!

Achievement Unlocked: Disable 10 police officers.

Money and ammo didn’t pop out of their pockets like they were supposed to, but this was a minor inconvenience. Circus looted their wallets, pocketed the cash, and kept going.

After another power up stop at a vending machine, it was back up the escalators to the street. There had to be more fun. There was always more fun, you just had to-

Yes!

There was a karaoke bar. They wouldn’t check my, no, Circus’ ID, because Circus wouldn’t let them. Circus just burst inside, kicking down doors like every badass ever should, then bounced over to the bar.

“Beer,” Circus demanded in his high, creepy, clown voice. The bartender, too scared, didn’t stop Circus, gave him a bottle of beer. It was too small, too weak for Circus, so he just made it better. In his hand the bottle grew massive, cartoonish, its contents foamy and at least three times as alcoholic before Circus chugged the massive brew, finishing off with a massive, floor-rattling burp.

Achievement Unlocked: Have a real funny burp.

Except nobody was laughing. They should have been laughing. Wasn’t Circus funny?

Fine, they didn’t think that was funny. I, no, no, Circus would show them what funny really was.

Circus jumped on stage, grabbed the microphone.

“Now I want to dedicate this song to a special lady out there,” Circus said.

“You’ll do no such thing, young man,” an elderly man from the back of the audience said.

“I’d like to see you try, old man, am I right, people? Wanna see Circus beat up an old man?” Circus asked, raising his arms to the crowd.

The old man calmly stepped forward, straightening his suit before touching a gem on the necklace he wore. He suddenly transformed into a massive, gleaming suit of polished black samurai armor. Circus grimaced, but looked cocky and strong, which was good because I don’t think I’d have been able to do that if I were there. The benefits of playing a game.

I wasn’t sure which hero he was, our country was rotten with heroes dressed like mystical samurai and ninjas (probably the Americans’ doing), but the way his sword started to fill the club with wind, and the way the wind cut through Circus’ bubble of distorted reality and hit me, I didn’t think it mattered too much.

First Circus was flying. Then Circus was falling. Then I hit a wall and everything exploded in pain.

I might have landed upside down, because that’s how the hero looked when he walked to me. I didn’t know why I couldn’t become Circus again, maybe the bastard had used a cheat code or a mod or a hack.

Even though it really hurt, I smiled. Flawless victory wasn’t always possible the first time out, especially with a new game. All I’d have to do is load an old save and try this again, and then I could pull it off.

Then Circus would own them all.

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

Odds favored me being one of the most talented technopaths on the planet (I could make nearly anything running on electricity my bitch), and my intuitive aptitude in engineering was probably unmatched by anyone without a handful of letters after their names and an impressive career as a mad scientist on one of the bigger countries’ most wanted lists.

But I wasn’t a mad scientist.

I couldn’t even afford to be a mad grad student.

I was just a girl with no legs in a homemade mech suit, getting ready to blow the fast food restaurant that had just fired her to hell and back.

And maybe, just maybe, enjoying watching her ex-boss trying to defuse the situation.

“Helen, be reasonable!” he yelled, ducking the jet of focused flame I used to shatter the front window above his head. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I was enjoying watching him suffer.

“I am being reasonable; I’m giving you a chance to escape with your life. In three minutes, though, Farley’s Fish Fry is going to be a pile of rubble whether you’re in it or not,” I said.

I laughed, my voice no doubt distorted by the shoddy digital filters I’d built into the suit, “Then I’m a villain. And if I’m a villain, call me Firewall.”

Truthfully, I didn’t mind being Helen Campbell too much, and I only meant for the suit to be called Firewall (its most current of many names, and one I was still liable to change), but in for a penny, in for a pound, I wagered. I hadn’t started building the suit as a gateway to villainy, far from it. Back when I was still in that engineering program, this suit had been a passion project of mine, a pathway to a greater world. With the resources that the school had to offer and my skill and intellect, it could have one day been a suit that could allow the common man to stand on even footing with superheroes. It would make them irrelevant, and allow for a world where people were truly equal and not beholden to gaudily dressed gods.

And if the money had held out, maybe it would have.

If you haven’t already guessed, the money didn’t hold out.

My mother was a great woman, but not a rich one, and my father… well, perhaps it was best that he was absent, but since mum said he had money, maybe I could have made some sacrifices and held my tongue, though it would have been difficult. While mum encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be in life, she couldn’t provide me with that life, and no matter how many side jobs she and I took on, they just couldn’t afford university.

Dropping out of my life’s passion was somewhere close to the top of the list of worst things to have ever happened in my life, and when that list included growing up a half-Maori bastard super woman who’d lost her legs just below the knee to a birth defect in one of her majesty’s colonies that wasn’t too fond of most of those factors, that says something.

And yet, I didn’t lose my temper. I could have, but I didn’t. I was famous for it, and god only knew how many times mum had to tear me out of some place in a rage when I was growing up, but this time, I held strong. I knew that if I just focused and did what was necessary, I could get into the program at a later point and I could still do great things with my life. I was even still able to work on the Firewall suit on the side, and though I lacked the best tools and components that the university had to offer, I was able to do surprisingly well with what the scrapyards had to offer. She was a misshapen and monstrous-looking mess of metal, but on the inside, she was something to be proud of.

Then Hugo fired me, citing budget cuts, and, well, any and all filters to that temper disappeared, and it was time to blow the ever-loving fuck out of a shitty restaurant.

I gave them fair warning, at least, yelling through the suit’s loudspeakers that I would destroy the restaurant in ten minutes and for everyone to evacuate. That only left Hugo inside, doing his captain going down with the ship impression, while most everyone else had run, or at least stuck around to see what heroes would inevitably come to try to knock the piss out of me.

Note the try. While hardly the most cutting edge piece of technology in the world, the Firewall suit had a strong compliment of weapons including sonic generators, flamethrowers, homemade rockets and an anti-grav unit that could lift a car and launch it close to half a mile. Couple that with the ability to lift several tons on its own and limited low-altitude flight, and I wagered I could’ve fucked up a fair few heroes. I wouldn’t win, nobody ever won in the long run against the superheroes, but I would’ve made a damn fine show in my last, terrible temper tantrum, wouldn’t I?

My only wonder was, where were they? There were enough people with phones around, enough police standing and waiting in the distance. Surely I’d been reported. Probably just waiting for the moment to make this as flashy as possible. Well, I’ll give you flashy.

“One minute, Hugo!” I yelled, launching a few rockets to blast letters from the sign.

“You don’t have the guts!” Hugo taunted, weakly, brandishing a mop at the window. I had to admit, for a shit manager, he had balls when pressed against the wall. Didn’t think he had it in him.

“I’ll crush you if I have to, Hugo!”

“I’d like to see you try!” he yelled, enough conviction in his voice to make you almost believe he meant what he said. One small rocket exploding the head of his broom, however, convinced him that maybe this wasn’t worth it, and he took off running out the door.

And now for the grand finale.

I closed my eyes, reaching out to the phones in the crowd. Those that weren’t getting this on video already soon were as I turned all their eyes to me.

“You think this is a fair world? It isn’t!” I roared, turning to face the crowd. “Just because they say you’re special, it doesn’t mean you are, even when you are special. Just because you can change the world doesn’t mean the world will give you the opportunity to do it. And so, today, watch what happens when… you know what? Fuck this speech. Who wants to watch me blow some stuff up?”

They’d looked like they were ready to nod off when I started to say something meaningful, but promise them destruction and they all started cheering like fools. I ought to have turned my weapons on them, given them a few harsh life lessons, and should I have had any ammunition after this, maybe I would have.

For the moment, though, I would give them what they wanted. I opened up with all the weapons Firewall had to offer. I coaxed her into pinpoint, beautiful destruction, raining fire and rockets and chunks of asphalt and concrete from the parking lot the size of cars on the restaurant. It went up in a beautiful mushroom cloud of flame and smoke, raining debris as far as the eye could see. Soon enough the walls caved in, and for a brief matter of moments, I felt the anger abate, and let pride take over.

Green triangles of electricity opened up in the air above me. Soon enough superheroes would pour through these Tri-Holes and try to take me in. I could have fought them, but that would have ruined my suddenly good mood.

Instead I opened up the front of the suit, pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from one of the inside cargo pouches, and lit up.

The hero who popped down in front of me, some prissy little blonde bitch in a white and gold suit meant to sculpt his muscles, glowered at me.

“Hands where I can see them,” he said. American. Of course he is.

Smiling up at the hero hovering before me, I said, “What seems to be the problem, officer?”

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

If life were better, I liked to think I would have been a teacher. I always believed there was a certain nobility in molding the minds of the future so they wouldn’t make the mistakes of the present.

But life wasn’t better, and the only future I could determine was mine and my family’s (which at the moment was just my little sister), and that of anyone foolish enough to get in my way.

That was why I liked to set the terms for all business deals whenever possible. My rank within our organization was pitiful, at best, but knowing my reputation and what I was capable of, my bosses gave me a lot of leeway in setting terms so I could be of most advantage.

That is why I liked to choose the Hill of Crosses.

Some called it a place of pilgrimage, but many others considered it a place of fear. I cannot blame either side. A hill covered in hundreds of thousands of crosses of all ages, shapes and sizes, packed tightly like insects feeding on a carcass, it can be as intimidating as it is awe-inspiring. Every so often our benevolent Soviet authorities liked to make a show of force, try to clean the crosses up, the most recent time I remember being in 2008, but just as quickly as crosses were taken down, people would put them up again.

It was a strange game for a strange place, but one I liked to encourage. Especially since it helped justify my fee.

Marius and I stood at the base of the hill. It was dark, and cold, as almost every deal was. He bobbed back and forth on his feet, nervous, puffing out almost as much steam as he was smoke. There were headlights in the distance, turning our way.

“Stop dancing,” I said.

“I’m not dancing,” he said.

“Then stop being nervous. This is your job. Relax. Be strong. Show no fear. And know that I have your back,” I said.

“I know all this. I do,” he said, though that didn’t stop his bobbing. This was his first business deal. His uncle (and my boss), Yuri, had gotten him the job. I had more experience, and I should have been running this deal, but I was just muscle. Marius was supposed to learn how the operation worked, and I was supposed to show him, so I would.

“I don’t want a fucking supervillain name, Iron Bear,” he said. If he was aiming for a low blow, he missed.

“All right, perhaps we can give you a superhero name instead. I will now call you Butterfly,” I said.

“Don’t call me Butterfly,” he said.

“Why not? You are jittery and flighty, and probably easy to crush. Until you earn a better name, or prove that you can be a proper villain and not some cheap hero, I will call you Butterfly,” I said.

“My uncle will hear about this,” he said.

“Go ahead. I believe he likes me better anyway,” I said. It was a half-truth, because I was sure Yuri did like me better, but he would still punish me if anything happened to Marius because family was family.

Yuri wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted punishing you.

“And what’s so wrong with heroes?” Marius asked, the headlights almost upon us.

It didn’t surprise me that Marius was the kind of kid who likely had superhero posters on his walls. Probably just ones from the motherland too, listening to all the propaganda, ignoring the heroes that the British and even America had to offer. He was young, he didn’t know any better.

I wouldn’t even fault him for sticking up for heroes when we were here on some very illegal business.

“Enough things to warrant a lecture sometime soon over drinks you will buy. But if you want the short version-”

“Please, anything to distract,” he said.

“Very well,” I laughed. “I could go on about how superheroes are a superfluous institution from a time when supervillains walked the Earth, or how they are a tool of imperialist oppressors from capitalists to socialists and everything in between. But what it comes down to in its simplest form is selfishness. They are selfish, and they won’t admit it. They claim that they are here to protect us, and spend most of their time looking flashy, spending money and living the high life of celebrities, using the threat that something terrible might happen to us if we do away with them, and because we are afraid, we do nothing. It is a very selfish form of blackmail, and I cannot approve of it.”

“And that makes villains better?” he asked.

I shrugged, “At least villains are honest about what they are. From your garden variety psychopaths to your freedom fighters who just don’t want to live under the rule of the superheroes and their global empires, I respect villains more. Did that distract you?”

“Some,” Marius said.

“Good, because now we get into character,” I said as the car pulled up in front of us and its four occupants exited.

To his credit, Marius was pretty good at pretending he wasn’t nervous.

“Hello, friends, which one of you is Lars?” Marius said cheerfully.

The hulking Swede with the thick beard from the passenger side of the car spoke up, “I am Lars.”

I should have guessed. He was the smallest of the four. I am still bigger than any of them (and much bigger than Marius), but the guns each of them had under their jackets made them confident. More confident than they should have been, but really, how could they not have been confident when confronted by two kids working the Lithuanian black market?

“Your boss could have chosen a more convenient location. Closer to the coast. I don’t like long drives,” Lars said.

Marius darted his eyes at me, but quickly said, “What can I say, Yuri’s a superstitious man.”

“He’s also a man who can get his hands on merchandise no one else can. Merchandise I’d like to see,” Lars said.

“Certainly, certainly we can arrange that, but first there is the matter of payment…” Marius suggested. Lars grunted, and one of his men from the back of the car pulled out a briefcase. He opened it to reveal stacks of Swedish krona.

“Excellent,” Marius said, turning to the wooden crate behind us. He pulled up the top and revealed its contents to the gathered Swedes.

“Gentlemen, let me present to you the Vendarak Screamer Rifle, 2014 model, fresh from Atlantis. Very illegal, very powerful. Powerful enough underwater to break stone, and on land… well, if you’re looking to have some problems with superheroes, and under no circumstances can I actually encourage you to do that, it should even the odds for you considerably,” Marius said. He lifted one in both hands, staggering only slightly under the weight.

“Would you gentlemen like a demonstration?” he asked.

“That will not be necessary,” Lars said, quickly drawing the pistol from his jacket. His men did the same, though with submachine guns. Marius was afraid.

I was not.

“You’re robbing us?” I laughed.

“With the price Yuri was asking, I’d say you were the ones doing the robbing. We’re just taking what we’re owed,” Lars said.

“That is your option, but it would be a stupid decision to make,” I said.

“Would it?” Lars asked.

“Did Yuri tell you what they call me?” I asked.

“Iron Bear,” he said.

“But did he tell you why?” I asked.

“Because you’re some giant Soviet with more muscles than brains?”

I gave him a chance to back down. I told him that this would be a stupid decision. I really did.

He had to know that what happened next was his fault.

I said, “No. It’s because I can talk to iron. And its friends. And guess what? They’re all my friends too.”

A twitch of my wrist ripped their guns from their hands and held them hovering between us. Then I took them to pieces without touching them. Making a fist with my hand crumpled their car into a small ball.

Then came the fun part.

They’d started running, calling me “super filth” and various other not so nice names. I raised both hands, and dozens, hundreds of metal crosses from the hill rose from the ground, swirling around me like a storm. I wrapped dozens around my body as a suit of armor, covering my face in a bear-shaped helm. The rest I kept floating around me, weapons to use at my discretion.

“Don’t be,” I said, widening the whirlwind of crosses to take down one of Lars’ thugs. “But what do you say to grabbing one of those screamer rifles, helping me take down the rest of these Swedes and their money and earning yourself a real supervillain name?”

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

I never had reason to dream until the Third Circle was chosen as the host circle of the exchange lottery. When my name was chosen as one of the 666 to be drawn in that lottery, I let myself dream even more. This would be my shot, I knew it.

Though the other 665 probably thought the same, didn’t they?

There were people from all around the circle. Greater demons and lesser demons and imps like me, and everything in between. Torturers and overseers and administrative assistants and even a guy who delivered bagels to the circle’s headquarters. I spent a long time talking to a drainage specialist, this giant demon easily eight times taller than me with great wings and a barbed tail, about what it was like to keeping up the fluid regulation to better punish the gluttonous damned. Then he showed me pictures of his children, most of whom had left the larval stage (though one was still molting).

Everyone had stories of their own, and every one of us would have done anything for this opportunity.

The chance to go topside!

The chance to be a supervillain!

Oh, it was such a beautiful thing. I only hoped it would be me.

Opportunities like this, well, they never came along. To keep the balance between the topside and the circles, people can only leave home for topside if someone from up top comes down here (usually for vacation, or for hiding if they’re a supervillain). And, what do you know, there was some hero who’d done something bad and needed a place to lay low for a while, freeing up a position to go up top and be a part of a supervillain team the heroes needed.

There were supervillain fans here, so many, but I doubted any were as big as me.

Even though I was a lot smaller than most of them.

A greater demon walked up to the podium at the head of the crowd carrying a large glass bowl with writhing, glowing centipedes in it; this I could see from climbing up on my drainage specialist friend’s shoulders. The greater demon tapped each of the three long horns on its head with a finger before speaking to us, its voice now amplified by the horns.

“Congratulations, one and all, for making it this far in the selection process. I know you all had to take many classes, cash in a lot of favors, and write many essays to get here, but today’s the day. One of the minions of hell I see before me will win a trip topside, and a chance at being a supervillain. Isn’t that wonderful?” he announced proudly, quickly drowned out by all of our cheers.

He continued, “Now, while you’re all winners in my book, there can only be one winner today. And their name is…”

He reached into the bowl, dug around, pulled out a long, mint-green centipede and crammed it in his mouth. My hearts beat rapidly and I wrung my hands in anticipation. Every flex of his jaw, every bulge of his eyes, every swelling in his near-transparent cheeks gave us hope. Whose name would come from his centipede goo?

Finally, he turned to the brick wall behind him and spat. Glowing, mint green centipede goo trickled down the wall and formed letters. Letters to a familiar name.

“And the winner is… ODIGJOD!”

I cheered, too loudly. There was some applause, mostly polite, some grumbling. Everyone here wanted the spot.

But they couldn’t kill me to win it. The contest rules said so.

So I ran to the front of the crowd and retrieved my orientation packet and my ticket for topside, which was great.

But my hearts didn’t stop hammering, oh no, they wouldn’t do that.

Not when I still had to tell mom and dad.

#I took the short way home, across instead of around the fields of torment. Doing this you always run a risk of falling into the slurry, but considering the gluttonous damned, face down in said slurry, are usually quite wide, jumping from island to island on them is easy enough. Truth be told, that’s how most smart people down here commute.

As I got closer to home, I passed Nitrinplsac, an imp even smaller, but older, than I. He was using one of the damned as a boat, pushing it along with a paddle, pulling interesting looking morsels from the slurry while occasionally smacking other damned with his paddle (as per his job description).

“Well ain’t you as cheerful as a topsider?” he croaked.

“I got it!” I could barely hold back.

“It?” he asked, cocking his eyes in opposite directions before it dawned on him, “Oh. OH! IT! Congratulations!”

He saw the look on my face, then added, “This is a good thing, right?”

It was as dank and homey as ever. Going by the screams coming out of the oven, mom had already started cooking dinner. She hummed as she mixed something in a bowl, sweeping her tentacles across the floor to clean it and add a fresh layer of mucous. Dad sat at the table, a pipe in his mouth and newspaper in hand.

“Celebrities topside, popularizing eating disorders. It’s a disgrace. Disrespectful to us working class. Don’t they know people down here rely on gluttony?” he grumbled.

“Well we can thank our lucky stars they put corn syrup in everything. Evens things out a bit,” mom said.

“Hello, mom, dad,” I said in the doorway.

They barely looked up from their tasks at me.

“Howdy, son,” dad said, his eyes still on the paper. “They finally choose that damnfool to go topside?”

I gulped. It was now or never.

“Yes, dad. They picked me,” I said.

They both stopped what they were doing, looking at me with almost all their eyes (no matter what happened in life, mom always made sure to keep one on the oven should there be anything inside).

“You’re serious?” dad said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“But you said no, didn’t you?” mom said.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. This was the hard part. This was where I had to be strong, which was always difficult with them. “I am going to do this.”

“But didn’t you think about us? Didn’t you think about how much we’ll miss you? How much we’ll need you, son?” dad pleaded.

“You know Christmas is in just over half a year. Business for us always picks up then. We’ll need you,” mom said.

This was how it always went. Every time I considered change, every time I considered doing something that wasn’t how things had always gone. Like that vacation to the core, or that time I wanted to try out for that internship, get that chance to work for the big guy downstairs. I knew they meant well, but I also knew that they just wanted to keep their son close.

“This is my chance… my chance to really make something more of myself,” I said.

“Oh, so you’re ashamed of us?” dad said.

“You know you have a lot to be proud of here. They don’t trust imps like us with a farm like we have, but for thousands of years our family has proven them wrong,” mom said.

I was glad she left me that opening, because it meant I could use their logic against them.

“And that’s what I want to do, but not here. Here I’ll be just another imp, but if I go topside, I’ll be something else. I’ll have all the chaos powers our kind has topside, powers beyond topsiders’ dreams. I’ll have a chance to be a supervillain, a chance to do some real evil. The kind of evil that would make anyone down here proud. The kind of evil that might get me promoted to a demon. The kind of evil that might let me meet the big guy downstairs! Wouldn’t that make you proud? Wouldn’t that make the neighbors jealous?”

They always hated our neighbors, so I knew that would be a good nail in the coffin of the argument.

Dad sighed, but got up from the table and approached me as mom had, “When do you have to leave?”

“A week’s time,” I said.

“Have you learned any of their languages?” dad asked.

“Some,” I said, proudly clearing my throat and using my best topside English. “Odigjod says hello. Odigjod is a imp from third circle of hell. I like how you smell!”

I knew I had much to learn, but since they didn’t speak a word of it (the topsiders we get down here are more the screaming and wailing types than conversationalists), they clapped cheerfully and brought me into a group hug.

“Just don’t mess up,” dad said.

“But know if you do, there’ll always be work for you to do here,” mom said.

“Thanks,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t need it. I would do great topside. I would earn my spot on the supervillain team, and I would be one of the greatest villains their world had ever seen.

“Make us proud, son,” dad said.

“Never forget who you are,” mom said.

“I will, and I won’t,” I said.

Now I just had to make good on that.

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

To me the past is as bright and clear as the present, the future a bit blurrier, but clearer to me than most.

With this power, I can see the dead, and even communicate with them in a way.

They call what I see auras, and they say I should be grateful for this gift.

Much of the time, I am.

But not always.

Not when they show me the worst of humanity.

Not like tonight.

It’d started a slow night, all told; the redcapes made sure of that. I’d broken up a couple muggings and a carjacking. As always, I enjoyed the excitement of their fear. While I wasn’t the most physically intimidating of foes, my white bodysuit and black hooded cloak I wore did make me look quite the spectre.

The porcelain doll mask that covered my face with my eyes blazing gold behind it certainly did nothing to dissuade this theory.

Most of the time they would run the moment they saw me, some recognizing me, most just thinking I was some redcape they didn’t recognize.

Nobody wanted to fuck with one of her majesty’s superheroes, after all.

For those that chose to stay and fight, I felt grateful for what little of the future I could see.

And the pair of brass knuckles I had in my belt.

They would clumsily attack. The future would help me easily dodge. I would beat them bloody, knock them out. Perhaps the police would find them, or perhaps they would just wake up and stumble home deciding to reconsider their lives after what I’d done to them.

Or they’d lick their wounds and come back the next night to do the same thing again.

The vigilante’s dilemma.

There were better solutions. More permanent solutions. But I could never go that far, not if I didn’t want to find myself more haunted than I already was.

I’d just finished caving in the carjacker’s teeth when I heard the sirens. The car’s spotlight lit me up, and oddly I felt a sense of relief as I ducked into the alley and saw the police pull up. They started talking to the man as he regained consciousness. Through what little remained of his mouth, he protested his innocence, saying that some rogue vigilante had fucked him up. The driver he’d tried to rob had long since sped away, and with no witnesses, it was his word against no one’s. They’d glimpsed me, after all, why wouldn’t they believe him?

I could see the auras of the cops wanting to believe the man, then getting close to doing so. Then they saw his gun. Then the belief transformed to them ordering the man to the ground, and then I was smiling.

From a slow night to a good night. Not bad.

That good night turned bad quickly when I turned around.

Now, I don’t see ghosts, not exactly. Everything you do in life leaves a trace of you behind, a sort of psychic imprint on every object or place you visit. It fades over time, but it never entirely goes away. The more important the event, the stronger an imprint it leaves. Births and deaths leave the strongest marks, though violence isn’t that far behind.

And that was what I saw.

Violence. Bright red strings, pulsing and tying together, creating a man and a woman. The man wanted, the woman didn’t. The violence was savage, her cries unheard, and in the end she was broken and bloody and alone, forcing herself to her feet to try and find her way home before anyone could see her. It was the same story told by any number of alleys in any number of cities, and it didn’t cease to sicken me.

Only one thing marked this one different from most.

The man was super. She wasn’t. She never stood a chance.

I hadn’t yet gotten numb to the righteous fury I felt whenever I saw one of these. Nor the vague sense of nausea that seeing something this horrible always brought about. I always tried to deal with these when I found them, with limited success.

But this one was fresh.

Less than a day.

I could find him. I could show him what it was like to deal with a woman with powers of her own.

And a good pair of brass knuckles.

His trail never found a car, nor did he take to the skies or teleport out. He lived close by.

His route was circuitous, through alleys and down main streets, but ultimately led into a moderately upscale apartment building. Not upscale enough for there to be a security guard, but there were still cameras. Problematic, but not impossible. If the cameras saw me, and if (no, when) what I was about to do made the news, they would just chalk it up to another sighting of their “Ghost Girl of Jo’burg” and leave it be.

Ghost Girl.

It was a terrible name the media grafted to me, but it had its mystery that kept what I had to do separate from me, which I did not mind.

I infiltrated the apartment building without trouble, following the strings of his aura up to one of the top floors. I’d seen strings like his before, strong, vibrant. Super, naturally, but something more. Something…

Something I would have to confirm in the actual apartment.

I reached the door. Looked through the door. He was asleep.

Perfect.

The tools from my belt made short work of his door lock, and I snuck inside. Quietly, I crept to the man’s bedroom. He slept peacefully, not that you could tell for the aura strings floating above him. They writhed about savagely, bright red and orange mostly, showing a life of violence and anger. I manipulated some of them to get a better look and only got more confirmations of this.

No black strings, at least.

Something behind me, calling to me. Aura strings reaching from the closet like whisps. Fingers that would grab me by the wrist and slowly pull me to them if they could. I followed them, opening the door as quietly as I could.

When I saw what was inside his closet, I swore.

A red cape.

He was a bloody superhero!

I kept looking, kept hoping that I’d find something to confirm that he was just some fan of hero costumes, but none of it was forthcoming. The suit hanging next to his closet was clearly professionally made out of materials only available to heroes. The aura strings I could read off of the costume confirmed his career, giving me insight into his (admittedly mediocre) costumed adventures. Lastly I looked at him, and though I knew what I was going to see, I looked anyway.

Nearly every one of his most violent strings came from years of heroing in service of her majesty. He was a redcape, a keeper of peace. Untouchable.

I looked at him, sleeping peacefully. Then I really looked at him. I could see what he did to that poor girl in that alley, could hear her cries of pain, her pleas for mercy that would not come because her attacker was one of the good guys.

I knew that leaving would be the smart move. The redcapes had so far ignored my vigilantism, probably because I was helping out and not making them look too bad, but if I were to do something here, now, to him, they would come down on me with the force of a pantheon’s worth of gods. They would kill me, or worse. If I left, I would live to fight crime for another day.

And then it would happen again.

There would be more girls. In time his violence would escalate. Then the red strings would be black, and the girls’ lives that he would take would be on me as well as him.

You know what you have to do. Remember Justin.

I could never forget.

This would destroy my life, but something good would come of it at least.

That was a sacrifice I didn’t mind.

Slipping my brass knuckles back on, I walked up to the sleeping man. He was smiling, having a very pleasant dream if the strings dancing above his head were any indication.

I would fix that.

“Hey. Redcape,” I said.

The man stirred, almost. I took him by the shoulder and shook him.

“Hey!” I exclaimed.

His eyes opened, blinking heavily, confused.

“Monica?” he said.

No idea who Monica was, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted to make sure he was awake for this.

Especially when his nose shattered against my fist.

Blood spraying, he howled, trying to clamber out of bed as I jumped onto it, then on him. Kicking, punching, breaking skin and bones with each hit and feeling really good about myself. I tried to enjoy it, tried to remember it, because I knew that these were likely to be some of my last happy memories.

He tried to punch me back, but I could see it more than two seconds in advance and dodge it easily, punching him under the armpit, feeling something else break. He was trained, quite well I must say, and was able to dodge better once he (in all his near-naked, middle of the night glory) got to his feet.

When I made to deliver a devastating blow to his sternum, his fists lit up with blinding light. Now with hands surrounded by energy, he grabbed me by the wrist.

“Who, the fuck, are you?” he snarled.

“I’m Ghost Girl,” I said, swinging my other hand to clock him in the wrists.

Before I could, I was off my feet, flung through the air and into a wall. I could hear, more than I could feel, the mirror shattering against my back, but the shards that cut into my flesh as I hit the floor bit sharply into me enough to make me not miss that lack of initial feeling.

I knew as soon as he took my feet from me that this fight was over. Not that I wasn’t going to give him hell, because I did, but his training and energy fists more than made up for my element of surprise and cheap pair of brass knuckles. For every good hit I got, he landed three more, flinging me into, then through walls and pieces of furniture. Every string of my aura looked like it was trying to leap from my body, probably due to the utter agony that I was in.

I rolled enough and dodged enough to keep him from shattering my mask, at least.

Wouldn’t want him to fuck up my face any more than it already was, would I?

A blow to the side of my head blacked me out not terribly long, but when I came to, I was on my back, looking up at him, smiling. He pressed a foot against my aching ribs, causing me to nearly black out again.

“I know who you are now. Ghost Girl. Heard about you. You do know vigilantism’s illegal, don’t you?” the redcape mocked.

“So’s raping girls in back alleys,” I said.

“No doubt. And for knowing that, I oughta kill you. Could do it pretty easy too. Just call up some of my friends and just make you disappear,” he said.

“Then why haven’t you?” I asked.

“Because you’ve got a body on you. A fucked face, to be sure, but a body that might make you marketable in some circles. And get me a handsome finders fee,” he said, dialing a number into his cell phone before putting it to his ear.

“Fifty-Fifty? Yeah, it’s Blast-Fist. The superhero? From South Africa? I came to your sister’s wedding? Yeah, look, I heard what you’ve been doing. You still offering finder’s fees for potential supervillains?”

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

The night was dark and the trees made it even darker. The air was brisk and cold. I could smell them. Hear them. Them and their dogs. Their radios. The gun oil of their rifles and shotguns.

I was faster than them. I could have killed them, should have killed them. It would have been a good fight. Bloody and fast, their throats giving way to my fangs, their last screams disappearing in a gout of blood…

But there were too many of them.

Too many of them, and too well organized, for once.

Go ahead, blame the gene-job.

Every time in every small town when some pretty girl died a horrible death, they blamed the nearest gene-job. They could’ve had their genes spliced with a pony, or a kitten, or the cutest fucking animal you could imagine, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Because gene-jobs weren’t natural, we weren’t human. It didn’t matter if we were poor fucks who wanted to be super and went to some back alley gene-dealer who went all Frankenstein on our DNA, or if we were kids snatched out of our beds and toyed with by mad scientists who’d gone long past monkeys and those fancy white rats that taste oh so sweet if you’re in a pinch.

I was one of the ones from that last group.

Everyone said they were one of those poor fucks, of course. Ask a hundred gene-jobs and they’d all say they were poor victims of some mad scientist, that their ugly mugs weren’t their own damn fault and that they didn’t pay for their persecution. Me, though, I knew what I was. I was one of Dr. Tongue’s finest, a monster of the highest and most vicious order. Part boy, part hyena, part komodo dragon, part shark, part god only knows what.

All Carnivore.

Well suited for this kind of pursuit.

I kept low, the fur and scales of my back blending in with the forest. I’m large, but my footsteps were light, not like their blundering.

Who is it this time? Cops? Department of Superhuman Affairs? Angry mob?

I’d have liked an angry mob. Them I could take. Them I could escape from. Disorganized and easily scared. Poorly armed. All it’d take was a roar, some claw marks on a tree, and they’d be done for.

Anyone more organized… they'd be a problem.

I couldn’t have problems. Not with what I’d done.

Guys like me, who’d done what I’d done, they didn’t go easy on. They wouldn’t put me in a human prison, no, they’d love the opportunity to just lock me up in the Tower and throw away the key. Find the deepest, darkest cell they could, turn it into a freak show, and then just laugh at the gene-job they caught.

Keep your hands and feet away from the bars.

No flash photography.

Don’t throw any food at the animal.

All because I killed three whores and some livestock.

And why did I have the idea they were more mad about the livestock?

The girls, they had it coming. Honest. They wouldn’t give me the time of day, not even when I paid them, and who runs a business like that? Honestly? I could’ve taken them if I wanted to, I even might’ve, I was strong enough, but they got me angry enough, and angry enough for me meant less screwing and more ripping throats and eating whatever I wanted from there.

It’s not cannibalism if you’re not all human.

I preferred my meat cooked, there was enough human in me still left for that, but a bit of blood every now and then, some fresh meat, and the animal parts of me felt mighty satisfied. Satisfied enough to let me keep enough control over them to guide them toward productive, or fun, activities.

This time, though, the torch and pitchfork crowd out there had the wrong idea. Some girl turned up face down in the river, kinda eaten-looking but not quite eaten. I didn’t do this one, it was probably her boyfriend because, let’s face it, it’s always the boyfriend, but I couldn’t tell that to anyone and have them believe it.

After all, I’m a gene-job. Aren’t all gene-jobs liars and killers?

I took a deep whiff of air. The pack had broken apart. There was a man off to one edge, further than the rest. He had a dog with him. German shepherd. His outfit was clean, freshly pressed by the smell of it. He carried a shotgun, and a radio on his belt crackled with static.

Police.

I’d never tasted police before. Gotten close, usually when being hauled into the back of a squad car, but never quite made it. The opportunity thrilled me.

There’s a first time for everything.

I stalked on the ground on all fours, making sure the wind was on my side and wouldn’t alert the dog as I circled behind the man. Soon I was close enough that not even the wind could hide my scent from the dog. It whined and struggled on its leash, barking out angrily, then defensively.

It knew the superior predator.

The cop was too slow to pick up on what the dog wanted to tell it.

I wasn’t too slow.

I leapt from the darkness. My claws opened the man’s throat before he could scream. My jaws clamped around the neck of the dog, and with a single shake, broke it.

And then I had my very own dying cop and dead, twitching dog to do whatever I wanted with. The cop wore glasses, looking up at me confused as he tried to hold his life’s blood in with both hands.

His eyes said, Please don’t kill me.

I was tempted to disobey him.

Sorely.

But I was also in a hurry.

He would die soon, anyway.

Or he would be found, and he wouldn’t die. He’d have a cool scar and an evil gene-job story.

I didn’t care.

There was a flash of green light behind me. Crackling sound like the radio’s static, but so fierce I could feel it in my fur. The air tasted like fire.

“The fuck…?”

I turned, ready to kill the light and noise.

And instead of a noise, it was a superhero.

White and gold and looking like some old statue. A well-groomed blonde man with muscles that looked out of a cartoon and teeth white enough to brighten the night.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The hero glowed gold, floating a few feet off the ground and coming right toward me, slowly.

“I’m Helios, villain,” the hero said. His voice said he was laughing at me deep down. Bright gold light shot from his hands, and the next thing I knew I was on my back, chest smoking.

“And if you want to live, you should know how to respect your betters,” he said.

I snarled at him, but I also wanted to live. I’d just go at him when he wasn’t paying attention.

“I thought they were crazy when they said they wanted to get some gene-jobs in on this, but one look at your file said you’d be perfect for what we’ve got in mind,” Helios said.

“Oh yeah, and what’ve you got in mind, hero?” I growled back.

He just smiled and said, “How would you like a job doing what you do best?”

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Once again, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!

Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

We went to the beach at night because it was comfortable to sleep on, and because if you chose the right stretch at the right time, the police wouldn’t even bother you until morning. When you’re lacking for places to sleep, you could do worse, and god knows all of us had seen enough worse to know what it was like.

We weren’t a family, not really, just a group of fair acquaintances who banded together for protection, sharing what we spent the days begging, borrowing and stealing (with a smile as charming and innocent as mine, I was quite good at the stealing part). There was usually liquor to go around, but I was more than satisfied with just enough food not to go to sleep hungry.

Our numbers fluctuated, from around six at our smallest to fourteen at our largest, people coming and going as they found jobs, a couch to sleep on, or in truly fortunate cases, love. Some of us had been on the streets all our lives, some of us just a matter of months (I was in between, going on a good year). Most of us were young, though some were old. There were men and women, humans and not (including a handful of gene-jobs who were always there, and two Atlanteans at different intervals). Some, like me, had powers, most did not.

If there was one thing we did all have in common, it was that we were unwanted. We’d all been thrown out by family, or society, or our governments in the cases of the Atlanteans. Uruguay was a paradise, and there were programs to help people like us, but we could never truly feel like we belonged. The streets were the only places that wouldn’t reject us, and so long as we played it safe and stuck together, we would survive. It was not an easy life, but like I said, we could do worse.It was a warm summer night when worse finally found me.

There were twelve of us then. As usual, Jorge was our walking bonfire, using his powers to swirl flames around himself, making for a good show and letting us cook meat when he’d stop moving. I was sitting, tuning my guitar and trying not to notice how cute Jorge was, because I knew he strictly liked girls. Some of the other guys were tossing around a ball and were likely to start a game of rugby soon. While I did not mind them having their fun, I knew they would try to talk me into playing, which I probably would, and then they would try to talk me into using my powers, which I certainly would not.

If that happened, people would get hurt.

I couldn’t let that happen.

A little ball of energy named Jisela sat down next to me, all smiles, and as usual my evening felt a little brighter.

“You got the guitar working yet, Felix?” she asked.

“Patience,” I said. “I could play it now, but you wouldn’t like what it’d do to your ears.”

“I know. I just like it when you play,” she said.

“Because I make money when I play?” I joked, slipping her a bag of hard candies from my guitar case. She had a sweet tooth and always had a way of talking me into getting her some candies with the money I earned playing.

She took the candies gratefully, though she didn’t meet my eyes as she tore into them, “Because it feels like what you’d think a good home feels like when you play.”

I didn’t feel like joking after that. Jisela couldn’t have been more than eleven, and though she never told any of us why she’d run away, the way she reacted whenever anyone mentioned her father, we all had our theories, none of them good.

Him I wouldn’t mind hurting.

It was just a fantasy, but an appealing one. I would never actually go so far as to hunt her father down and use my powers to break him into small pieces, great though the fantasy might be. Mostly because I’m not a very violent person, but partly… partly because it just feels unheroic.

When I was little, before I found my powers and before father found me with my boyfriend and put me onto the street, I idolized the superheroes. I watched their movies, I read their comics. When I was eight, father even flew all of us to Buenos Aires to see El Capitán at a public appearance, and I was lucky enough to get to meet him for a moment, shaking his hand and getting an autographed poster.

It was, and still is, the happiest day of my life, and from that day forward I wanted nothing more than to be a superhero.

That wasn’t going to happen, not anymore. Nobody wanted a homeless hero. They just saw us as-

“Hello, friends!” The voices were harsh, speaking in English with British accents. There were four of them. The capes they wore said they were heroes, or at least wanted us to think they were. They tried to sound pleasant, but their smiles were wolfish. Jorge let the flames die around him, a look of pure fear on his face.

“If you could all gather around for a moment, we’d like to talk to you, ask a few questions!”

I tried to keep Jisela behind me, but her curiosity got the better of her fear and she kept peeking out as we joined the rest of the group.

One of the capes smiled and said, “I want to apologize for interrupting the wonderful evening you good people are having, so we’ll keep this brief. First, so I’m not crazy, does everyone here speak English?”

“I do, but I am the only one,” I said. It was a lie; close to half the group, including Jisela and two of the three gene-jobs did, but I wasn’t going to reveal them. I kept one hand on Jisela’s shoulder to make sure she would not say anything foolish.

The cape who spoke pinched the skin between his brows, but kept smiling, “Very well. Then will you relay to them the message I’m about to give?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“We’re running a program, right now, seeking potential superheroes from people who’ve had a rough go of things in life. We’re looking for anyone here who’s got superpowers, or been genetically altered, as I can see from the couple-few gene-jobs you’ve got here. If you’d consider joining us for the evening, hearing what we have to say, there’s a warm bed and a hot meal in it for you. If you, however, aren’t super, but know of anyone here who is, well, that offer of a warm bed and hot meal still stands as something of a finder’s fee. Will you translate?” the cape said.

I didn’t need to, but I did for appearances. Even to those of us who didn’t speak English, the capes’ intentions were clear.

No offer like this ever comes without serious strings.

What a time to feel wanted.

Everyone started talking very fast, low, hushed, fearful. Though we kept our words in Spanish (or in a couple cases, Portuguese), I had this sick feeling the capes knew everything we were saying. They spread out slightly, not quite surrounding us, but looking like they meant to.

They know what they’re doing. They know what we are. They won’t take no for an answer.

This I knew for sure. What I didn’t know was what to do about it.

The safest path would be to do exactly what they said. Superheroes would have no problem killing, or worse, anyone who resisted.

And if I did that, half of us would be taken god knows where, and since they were heroes doing what heroes did, they would probably send Jisela home.

The less safe path? It would be suicide, but I was sure it would be enough to give the others a chance to run.

A chance is better than no chance, yes?

Calmly I stepped away from Jisela. I planted my feet firmly on the ground and balled my fists, willing my power to surround me and embrace me with greater strength than it ever had before. The crystals surrounded me, bonding to me, becoming me. Soon I was no longer myself, but a giant beast made of jagged crystal shards, twice the height of the tallest men here and with the strength of hundreds.

The four capes activated their powers, ready for a fight, and in kind I raised my arms and roared, “RUN!!!”

I didn’t know if that command was more to my friends or to the heroes, but before I could figure that out, the fight had already begun.

Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.